The Niagara News is the community newspaper of Niagara College located in Welland and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. It is created and produced by the students of the Niagara College Journalism program.

Just don’t call him a fascist

Today Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States of America, as thousands of protesters storm Washington. Dozens of groups have called for demonstrations, ranging from peaceful protests to militant action aimed at shutting down the inauguration.

Citizens, activists and organizations around the country have sounded the alarm, raising serious concerns regarding Trump’s nativist politics, his past derogatory comments and behavior, as well as his fitness to hold the highest office in the country.

Alongside the swelling number of protestors, the number of people denouncing Trump as a fascist has also been growing. Those who have hurled the label at Trump range from journalists and academics to citizens and celebrities.

The only problem is they’re wrong.

Donald Trump may be unfit to hold the office he has been elected to. He may be a jingoist and a xenophobe. He may even score pretty high on the authoritarian personality scale developed by the theorists of fascism Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

But he is not a fascist.

Labeling him as such is not only false, but irresponsible.

Fascism isn’t a catch-all term for anything one doesn’t like, nor is it slur that can be accurately hurled at odious reactionaries like Trump.

It is a specific ideology, with a specific political program to implement. And yet, as a term, it is consistently applied as little more than a political epithet by those who either do not understand it’s meaning and historical context, or are simply uninterested in carryin gout a discourse in good faith.

In his 1944 article “What is Fascism?” George Orwell, whose insight and conviction we could all do well to refresh ourselves with at the present moment, characterized those who recklessly fling around the word as attaching unhelpful emotional significance to the term.

“By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working class,” said Orwell. He went on to lament that all one could do in the face of such confusion was utilize the term with a “certain amount of circumspection” and not “degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

It would seem as fitting a time as any to take Orwell’s advice seriously.

Fascism is not synonymous with reactionary populism and never has been. And when one looks at the defining characteristics of fascism, as well as the historical context of its rise to power in countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain, it becomes quite clear that Trump falls short of the mark.

Fascism is a middle-class political ideology which seeks to unify all socio-economic classes within a country under the leadership of a strong and expanded state, which offers an authoritarian alternative to national decline and has historically risen in opposition to radical working-class movements vying for state power.

But even more so than this, fascism is defined by its ability to mobilize shock troops and brown-shirts on the streets. It is a hallmark of the movement to have grass-roots enforcers with boots on the ground, which are given carte-blanche to operate on behalf of the state.

As Trump has no such street presence, he did not use an organized militia to aid his rise to power and does not seem poised to so following inauguration. He does not preach an economic strategy of class-collaboration, nor does he see increased government intervention into the economy as a positive strategy.

If Trump moves to make the Minutemen or the Ku Klux Klan an auxiliary of the national guard, gives them authority to patrol working-class and minority neighborhoods, and sanctions their terrorizing of immigrants, trade-unionists, leftists and the socially “undesirable,” then I will change my tune.

Until that time comes, as distasteful as I find the man’s politics, I’ll continue to point out that Trump isn’t a fascist.

Because that is what fascism looks like in practice.

What is perhaps most disconcerting about Trump is not so much his politics, but that his ascendency has created space for a new fascistic discourse to bloom in the United States. The David Dukes and Don Blacks of the world – people whose hateful views have long been rightfully relegated to the dark corners of the internet – have been able to come out of the woodwork and into public political life for the first time in decades.

This is troubling. By labeling Trump a fascist, we blind ourselves to the legitimate creeping fascist threat – as marginal as it may be at the current time. We also degrade the term, rendering it so malleable that it becomes useless in situations where it can, and should be, accurately applied.

Trump is no guiltier of allegiance to fascist ideology than George W. Bush or Stephen Harper – both of whom faced similar accusations by certain segments of the political left.

In fact, Trump is a political opportunist whose allegiance to any sort of consistent positive-political program is tenuous at best.

As such, the case for Trump being a fascist falls and shows itself as little more than an application of intellectual laziness.

Post-election emotions have understandably been running high on both sides of the political spectrum. This is to be expected. Nevertheless, we should be striving to face up to reality squarely and call things by their right names.

So when Donald J. Trump is inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States of America today, my heart will be with the people out in the streets protesting. If I was present in Washington, I would be out there with them.

I do not wish to downplay the impact a Trump presidency will have on millions of people both in and outside America.

Both politically and personally, I find the man appalling. In a past Niagara News column, I wrote that “by any barometer he is unfit to be president.”